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  Almost anything Westerners do has the potential to backfire. If Western governments try to encourage the growth of domestic institutions and civil society in the Middle East, assuming that such organizations will provide women with an outlet to contribute with their lives and not their deaths, their footprint necessarily has to be imperceptible. If the indigenous population identifies these institutions with Western or American influence, civil society will be undermined from the get-go. The institutions will appear to be puppets of the imperialists and the people who participate in them will be at risk from terrorist groups for their perceived collaboration.

  It has been proven that as women become more educated and have fewer children, their rate of development increases exponentially. Women in positions of leadership serve as role models, causing other women to aspire to something more positive than participating in violence. Women’s participation in the political realm does not necessarily require a secular state in the Islamic world. In Indonesia, for example, women’s participation is not at odds with Islamic institutions. This means that women are not forced to choose between their religious traditions and modern society when they campaign in elections or run for public office. Having more Islamic women in visible positions of leadership in a traditional context resonates in a way that forcing a Western template on all Muslim women does not. This more culturally sensitive approach to reform requires us to rethink modernity and feminism in a way that allows for the perpetuation of religious tradition and does not require a separation of religion and state in order to be successful.

  RECOMMENDATIIONS FROM THE SIDELINES

  It is important that scholars share their findings with policymakers, analysts, and members of the military to ensure that they learn the lessons of the past and do not make the same mistakes over and over again. Tel Aviv University psychologist Ariel Merari is often quoted as saying that the terrorism researcher has the obligation to make terrorism known. By this he means it is important that we show terrorism for what it is, and not for what people might imagine it to be. Actual terrorism and counter-terrorism are far removed from their depictions in movies and fiction. Terrorism is mostly dull; there is a lot of waiting around. It is not the thrilling, nonstop roller-coaster ride portrayed in books by writers such as Robert Ludlum or John le Carré or in films featuring imaginary heroes such as James Bond or Jason Bourne. We need to make known, for example, what terrorist organizations are doing to the women of their own community. When terrorists deliberately put women in harm’s way, when they capitalize on women’s victimization or, even worse, when they abuse women themselves, we have an obligation to advertise their crimes.

  More and more examples have emerged of terrorists using coercive techniques to pressure or force operatives to commit heinous acts. We have seen cases of individuals who have been duped and of suicide car bombers (in Iraq, for example) who were unaware that they were on a deadly mission. In several cases, the drivers were told they were taking something, possibly illegal, through checkpoints, only to have the payload detonated from afar with a cell phone or a mobile device. In other cases, people’s families have been held at gunpoint and threatened with death and dismemberment unless a family member goes through a checkpoint with a car bomb. Finally, there has been an increasing number of cases in which the operative could not possibly have made the decision to be a bomber because he or she was either too young or mentally incapacitated.

  We need to do a much better job of showing what involvement in terrorism is really like. Even among those individuals who believe that suicide attacks (or martyrdom operations) are an appropriate response to occupation or oppression, few support the use of children or coerced women. There is no sacrifice to Allah when there is no choice. If people who truly believed in the Salafi message knew that this was how Al Qaeda–affiliated groups in Iraq operated, Al Qaeda’s popularity would surely plummet further. The fact is that Al Qaeda is increasingly alienated from most Muslims and even from most Islamists, having lost the strategic initiative in Iraq, Indonesia, and elsewhere.5 This is a trend that we need to encourage.

  TERRORISTS AND THEIR CONSTITUENCIES

  There is no single template that describes women who become involved in terrorism. Some women choose to get involved with terrorist organizations to help their community. Others have no choice. Facing the certainty of death at the hands of their own families, dismemberment by Wahhabites (the Chechen term for jihadis), or being sold to terrorist organizations, those with no choice are in a truly grim situation. The organizations that either attract willing commitment or obtain compliance by force seem to have a different relationship to the civilian population in which they operate. Where the insurgency is inspired by ethnicity or nationalism, the terrorist organizers may make great efforts to inculcate a sense of devotion from their people. They see themselves as the future leaders of the community and strive to protect their “constituents” to the best of their ability. For these groups, all politics is local and the core public is also local. JI’s rhetorical support for the global movement has been useful for its local struggle. It affords the organization greater prestige as well as access to international financial support. At the end of the day, however, JI’s focus will always be local first, and then maybe regional, rather than global. Similarly, groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas create infrastructure, provide social services, and make a significant effort to improve the lives of men and women in their communities, while also fighting the other side. These groups make an important distinction between their civilians and those who oppose them. And though they certainly do not respect the lives of their enemies, they do seem to care about their own people.

  However, in the globalized terror networks, particularly Al Qaeda, the people doing the fighting often have no connection to the civilians around them. The leadership’s goals extend beyond the parameters of one state or area, and so the local population is just one of several possible constituencies. Also, the people they mobilize may be far removed from the location of the conflict. These outside recruits may have little or no knowledge of the conditions in which the local population lives. This disconnect may lead them to be far more cavalier about the value of life and the extent to which they coerce the local population. This is equally true for both religious and secular terrorist organizations.

  Palestinian terrorist groups know that whatever they do will be observed by the Palestinians upon whose support they rely. In contrast, many of the Sunni insurgent groups in Iraq do not care what happens to ordinary Iraqis. Both their goal and their audience lie outside the Iraqi state (jihadis do not even recognize Iraq as a state because it was “created” by the British during the colonial period). The Sunni insurgents have only a superficial connection to the local population. It follows that they have no qualms about subjecting Iraqi women to heinous treatment. In Chechnya, the situation is complicated by a culture in which kidnapping and rape have been institutionalized as a form of courtship. Selling one’s daughter or sexually exploiting a woman to get her parents’ permission for marriage are—shockingly—almost routine. The terrorists have been able to adapt existing customs for their own purposes.

  Among the Tamils, Irish Republicans, and Palestinians, there has been little need to convince women to join the movement. The women themselves pressured the leadership of the terrorist movements to allow them to participate in violence. Eventually, the leaders agreed. Both the pressure and the agreement occurred within a supportive environment: a majority of Catholics in Northern Ireland expected, even demanded, that everyone step up and do something for the good of the community. Similar conditions applied among Tamils, Palestinians, and Chechens. Siobhan, Darshika, Puhalchudar, Zura, and Ahlam, were not coerced. And yet, the subtle pressures exerted by the culture of violence in their societies may have limited these women’s options from the very beginning. Such a culture perpetuates more violence and the cycle may appear impossible to break.

  WOMEN’S STATUS

  Given the inc
reasing prevalence of women on the terrorist front line, it is curious that so few women have achieved leadership positions within terrorist organizations, as they did in the 1970s. Both Astrid Proll and Ulrike Meinhof, for example, held crucial leadership positions in the Baader–Meinhof Group.6 We have seen no comparable development in Palestinian organizations, for example, where patriarchy remains the rule.

  Women’s involvement in terrorist groups has not helped level the gender playing field after all. Even in groups where women comprise from 30 to 60 percent of the bombers, they are rarely in charge. Few organizations have female ideologues who might include something about women’s equality in their manifestos. Even in the groups where women play a larger role, they are still the second string. Women tend to become necessary when men are incapacitated, but they are an expedient choice at best. Until women’s lives are valued as much as their deaths, women’s participation in violence will not create more opportunities for other women; it might actually hurt a society in ways we cannot fathom. If the only way intelligent and politically motivated women can participate in politics is through death, these societies are losing their most capable women. They will not be able to run for office, have satisfying careers, or contribute in other, more positive ways to building or enhancing their communities.

  Almost all of the women whose stories have been examined in the course of my research for this book agreed on one thing: feminism was not the basis of their participation in the terrorist movement. Many of them were decidedly antifeminist. Several confided in me that they felt betrayed by the feminist movement in their respective countries, because the feminist agenda conflicted with nationalist agendas. Those committed to the terrorist cause tended to look upon women’s issues as either irrelevant to the nationalist cause or as a lesser priority. When asked whether they felt any unique experiences as women terrorists qua women, they found the question to be puzzling, and eventually all answered no. They had no unique experiences of being women, just of being oppressed. When a terrorist movement treated women as equals, feminist motivation was not part of the calculus. Jihadi women like Umayma Hasan, the wife of Al Qaeda’s second-in-command, do not consider themselves particularly oppressed, regardless of whether Westerners see them that way. Thus participating in violence is not intended to level the playing field in their societies—this is not one of their goals.

  These findings contradict those of at least one observer, Anat Berko, who argued that Palestinian women bombers were seeking equality with men. Among the women with whom she spoke, several reported that they were fighting for their rights as women. “Whatever a man can do, a woman can also do,”7 said one; another claimed: “There is no difference between a man and a woman in the Intifada. We all want to protect our land, there is no difference in the recruitment of a guy or a girl, but the percentage of women that are recruited is lower because there are women that have another role in society as homemakers.”8 The women with whom Berko spoke might reflect the specifics of Palestinian society and women’s roles in it. Certainly, Ahlam at-Tamimi is a model of women’s liberation and leadership. She does not consider herself unequal to men even though she works for a conservative religious organization with no female leaders. Yet with her fame or notoriety she is winning office for Hamas in local elections by becoming the face of Hamas’s women. She chooses to do this while wearing traditional Islamic robes and the veil.

  Western assumptions are not always helpful in this context. Not all women aspire to Western-style equality (where it exists!). The fact that many terrorist women are at loggerheads with the feminists in their society was, for me, completely unexpected. Apparently, the desire by some women to show a terrorist organization that women are just as dedicated to the cause as men does not mean that they want to be the same as men, or be treated as men.

  MEETING THE TERRORIST THREAT

  To avoid the impossible dilemma of either invasively checking women for explosives and causing popular outrage or of not checking women at all and getting bombed, Coalition forces in Iraq established the Daughters of Iraq—Iraqi women who conduct searches at checkpoints. In other parts of the world, security services are increasingly drafting women to prevent attacks by female terrorists. Indonesian police employ women to look out for JI militants; the Israeli Defence Forces makes sure that female recruits are stationed at border crossings; and Turkish police have hired a handful of women police officers in case they have to search potential Kurdish Worker’s Party operatives. Women can no longer pass through checkpoints without scrutiny. Still, the number of female terrorists continues to rise. Innovations in security technologies and practices will be only short-term solutions at best.

  We will also soon see new kinds of operatives emerge as terrorists adapt to changing security environments and as their targets become more difficult to penetrate. Already some terrorist groups have turned to young children, either coercing them into becoming bombers or “volunteering” them without their knowledge. In Iraq and Afghanistan, this manipulation of young operatives has already started. In Indonesia, the women of JI are preparing a new generation of child militants. In the West Bank and Gaza, Hamas has television shows that feature a fundamentalist Mickey Mouse–like cartoon character, Farfour, who tells children that the ultimate goal is to be a shahid. In Afghanistan in May 2006, the Taliban tried to dupe a six-year-old boy, Juma Gul, into becoming a suicide bomber. They forced him to wear a vest that they said would shower flowers when he pushed the plunger. They told him that as soon as he saw a group of American soldiers, he was to “throw [his] body at them.”9 In Iraq, terrorist organizations are recruiting girls as young as fourteen and may soon try to find even younger girls to carry out attacks.

  While counter-terrorist units like the Daughters of Iraq may have some short-term effect, a more fundamental approach is needed for the longer term. I suggest responding to the four plus one Rs with three Ds: delegitimize, deglamorize, and demobilize. This entails showing what involvement in terrorism is actually like and, in the process, undermining the basis upon which women (and men) become involved. In order to combat the lure of terrorism, and the support and appreciation women martyrs receive from their communities, we need first to delegitimize violence by showing that violence is sanctioned neither by the Qur’an nor by the Hadith. We need to challenge involvement in terrorism at the level of image and undermine its attractiveness. Doing so might involve having former terrorists tell their stories, showing how they became disillusioned.

  The media has all too often inadvertently glamorized terrorists, depicting them as very evil but also very powerful. Instead, they should be deglamorized, shown to be corrupt and hypocritical. According to John Horgan, director of the International Center for the Study of Terrorism, there is no shortage of celebrity ex-terrorists who can deglamorize and demythologize the terrorist lifestyle. Detailing how the women participate against their will is key. This can also be done by stressing the devastation caused by terrorist attacks against other women and children. Finally, we need to show the futility of terrorism. Terrorists rarely if ever succeed in achieving their primary political or religious goals, whereas negotiation and reconciliation have a significantly better track record.

  Most of all, we need to provide pathways for women’s exit from terrorist organizations. Few of the current deradicalization programs (whose effectiveness remains an open question) have facilities or programs specifically for women or children. Yet it is the women and children who will carry on the conflict in the future. We need to demobilize the women so that they are no longer involved in shooting, killing, and bombing. Given that often the women are more radical than the men and that some are true believers, it is too lofty a goal to try and change their minds, but we can certainly aim to change their actions. By eliminating the immediate source of violence from the community while simultaneously undermining its very legitimacy, we might finally break the cycle of violence.

  Much of the groundwork needs to be laid by the local women
themselves. An organization in Indonesia led by Lily Munir has the right idea: they have set up several Islamic schools for girls. The girls learn the Qur’an, but they also learn the positive things that the Qur’an has to say about women. At the same time as they are empowered by the curriculum, the girls learn practical skills like mathematics, computer science, and English.10 They will have the resources to become future leaders of their communities. They are learning enough about Islam that, in the future, no charismatic leader can manipulate the text and convince them that Holy Scripture endorses the killing of other Muslims. At the same time, they are also learning the skills to be successful in the modern world. The women in these schools have a chance to do something great with their lives, not their deaths. Some of the women in this book, like the Irish operative Siobhan, have shown that a peaceful transition is possible and that they can make a positive contribution to the future instead of being the shells for the bombs that they carry for men.

  NOTES

  Prologue

  1 Magomed Abdurashidov and Yuliya Rybina (Makhachkala), “They Found a Conductor for the Bombed Subway Trains,” Kommersant Online, April 30, 2010, p. 5.

  2 Irina Gordiyenko, “What Anvar Sharipov, Suspected of Organizing the Terrorist Acts, Had to Say,” Moscow Novaya Gazeta Online (in Russian), April 12, 2010.

  3 www.jamaatshariat.com/ru/content/view/406/29

  4 momento24.com/en/2010/04/02/moscow-bombing-teens-widows-and-suicide-bombers